Kolkata: Three flights take Japanese, Bhutanese citizens home

Subhro Niyogi | TNN | Updated: Apr 15, 2020, 11:35 IST

One of the Druk Air flights that flew Bhutan citizens to Paro

KOLKATA: Three planes carrying passengers from Kolkata took off on Tuesday. This was the busiest traffic that Kolkata airport has witnessed in three weeks since fights were suspended to control the spread of Covid-19. In addition, SpiceJet operated a cargo flight from Chennai to Kolkata.
In the past three weeks, there have been only three passenger flights — one that repatriated Armenians, another that carried citizens of the European Union and a third that evacuated American citizens.
On Tuesday, two Druk Air flights repatriated 50 Bhutan nationals, one in the morning and another in the afternoon. In the mean time, a chartered flight of a private firm was used to transport 13 Japan nationals to Bengaluru en route to Tokyo on a Japan Airlines (JAL) flight later.
The 13 engineers from Japan, all working at the Tata Hitachi plant in Kharagpur, flew out in an Embraer Legacy aircraft that departed at 12.35am for Bengaluru, where other Japanese citizens joined them to board the JAL flight for Tokyo.
In the Japanese capital, Indians stranded due to the ban on international and domestic flights to India rued yet another opportunity to return home. “We had approached the Indian embassy and requested that we be allowed to travel by the JAL flight. But permission was refused like it had been on earlier occasions when flights went empty from here to bring Japanese citizens back from India,” said Nagerbazar resident Anuvav Palit, who had gone to Japan on an assignment in the first week of February. He has been stranded there since then as he was unable to take a flight home before the lockdown. While Palit’s 68-year-old mother, wife and 10-month-old child continue to wait for his return, so do families of 185 other Indians stranded in Tokyo.
Earlier in the day, an ATR-42 aircraft of Druk Air picked up 40 passengers, including two children, from the Kolkata airport. The flight departed for Paro at 8.45am. Later, another Durk Air-operated flight departed at 3.25pm.
While other countries have been repatriating their citizens, India has not allowed Indians to return since international fights at short notice were suspended last month. Palit who is holed up in a service apartment in Shibua, Tokyo, said many Indians were depressed. Several Indians are also stranded in Gulf countries with the Indian government staying mum on their repatriation requests.